Shaun O'Dell

Purple Brush 8

Shaun O’Dell’s paintings, installations, videos, sculptures, and music explore the overlapping realities of human and natural structures. Whether abstract or figurative, they often read like hieroglyphics in that they piece together a philosophical portrait of reality. Purple Brush 8 is a painting that details a meeting of geometric forms and the optical play that results. The halves of two monochromatic sets of concentric squares meet in the center. The joining of two sides of the forms gives birth to a third image: a diamond shape that radiates outward from the canvas. The work is characteristic of O’Dell’s oeuvre in that a simple gesture results in a much more complex proposition, drawing us deeper into a higher order.